Ship had made a temporary repair to turbo-generator duplex lube oil strainer in June.
Never made permanent repair in part
because diesel-generator could not handle load alone,
so they did not want to take T/G offline.
They did not have the redundancy that they were supposed to have.
After discharging but before leaving dock, CE decided to change strainer baskets.
In the process, temp repair allowed lube oil to leak onto hot T/G,
ensuing fire ended up killing 3 and destroying engine room.

source

CTX

type

C

volume

1500B

material

dead

3

link

Here is an Engine Room explosion where we actually have a real cause.
Would that we had this for all the EX casualties.

ETC puts spill volume at 1500B, but USCG silent on this.
Not sure what this based on.
ETC claims this spill took place in 1993.

Hess had all kinds of ISM-like paperwork in place.
There were some 7 audits between when the temp repair was made
and the fire, none of which corrected the situation.
The paperwork was just that, paperwork.

Generators were obviously undersized.
This is not surprising
Yards uses and Class allows optimistic output and load requirements.
Hellespont found that generators must be sized
at least 20% larger than class requirements
to actually do the job, without bringing another generator on line.